I do think the EA example is quite good on an illustrative level. It really strikes me as a rare case where we have an enormous pile of public empirical evidence (which is linked in the post) and it also seems by now really quite clear from a common-sense perspective.
I don’t think it makes sense to call this point “contentious”. I think it’s about as clear as these cases go. At least of the top of my head I can’t think of an example that would have been clearer (maybe if you had some social movement that more fully collapsed and where you could do a retrospective root cause analysis, but it’s extremely rare to have as clear of a natural experiment as the FTX one). I do think it’s political in our local social environment, and so is harder to talk about, so I agree on that dimension a different example would be better.
I do think it would be good/nice to add an additional datapoint, but I also think this would risk being misleading. The point about reputation being lazily evaluated is mostly true from common-sense observations and logical reasoning, and the EA point is mostly trying to provide evidence for “yes, this is a real mistake that real people make”. I think even if you dispute EAs reputation having gotten worse, I think the quotes from people above are still invalid and would mislead people (and I had this model before we observed the empirical evidence, and am writing it up because people told me they found it helpful for thinking through the FTX stuff as it was happening).
I think if I had a lot more time, I think the best thing to do would be to draw on some literature on polling errors or marketing, since the voting situation seems quite analogous. This might even get us some estimates of how strong the correlation between unevaluated and evaluated attitudes are, and how much they diverge for different levels of investment, if there exists any measurable one, and that would be cool.
I am persuaded by neither the common sense or the empirical evidence for the point about EA. To be clear (as I’ve said to you privately) I’m not at all trying to imply that I specifically disagree with you, I’m just saying that the evidence you’ve provided doesn’t persuade me of your claims.
Yeah, makes sense. I don’t think I am providing a full paper trail of evidence one can easily travel along, but I would take bets you would come to agree with it if you did spend the effort to look into it.
I do think the EA example is quite good on an illustrative level. It really strikes me as a rare case where we have an enormous pile of public empirical evidence (which is linked in the post) and it also seems by now really quite clear from a common-sense perspective.
I don’t think it makes sense to call this point “contentious”. I think it’s about as clear as these cases go. At least of the top of my head I can’t think of an example that would have been clearer (maybe if you had some social movement that more fully collapsed and where you could do a retrospective root cause analysis, but it’s extremely rare to have as clear of a natural experiment as the FTX one). I do think it’s political in our local social environment, and so is harder to talk about, so I agree on that dimension a different example would be better.
I do think it would be good/nice to add an additional datapoint, but I also think this would risk being misleading. The point about reputation being lazily evaluated is mostly true from common-sense observations and logical reasoning, and the EA point is mostly trying to provide evidence for “yes, this is a real mistake that real people make”. I think even if you dispute EAs reputation having gotten worse, I think the quotes from people above are still invalid and would mislead people (and I had this model before we observed the empirical evidence, and am writing it up because people told me they found it helpful for thinking through the FTX stuff as it was happening).
I think if I had a lot more time, I think the best thing to do would be to draw on some literature on polling errors or marketing, since the voting situation seems quite analogous. This might even get us some estimates of how strong the correlation between unevaluated and evaluated attitudes are, and how much they diverge for different levels of investment, if there exists any measurable one, and that would be cool.
I am persuaded by neither the common sense or the empirical evidence for the point about EA. To be clear (as I’ve said to you privately) I’m not at all trying to imply that I specifically disagree with you, I’m just saying that the evidence you’ve provided doesn’t persuade me of your claims.
Yeah, makes sense. I don’t think I am providing a full paper trail of evidence one can easily travel along, but I would take bets you would come to agree with it if you did spend the effort to look into it.